Africa Emerges – but from what and into what? A triumph of hope over experience in Robert Rotberg’s new assessment of the continent – By Keith Somerville

“Propelled to some extent by significant drivers of economic uplift such as the dramatic spread of mobile telephone capabilities and China’s pulsating appetite for African resources, sub-Saharan Africa, almost for the first time in more than 60 years, has a golden interlude in which it and its peoples can take advantage of abundant new opportunities”. This is a fine and lofty start to a book by an academic with an established reputation as a researcher and commentator on the continent. Components of this golden interlude, it seems, are the “startling improvements in child mortality”, the decline in dictatorships and…

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